


Ten Moves Ahead

by Laylah



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: M/M, Pre-Canon, Topping from the Bottom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-14
Updated: 2009-11-14
Packaged: 2017-10-02 18:37:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/pseuds/Laylah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The lessons I would most value now would not come from withered old men with their heads buried in dusty tomes." He takes Bergan's bishop with his knight, the pieces clicking lightly together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ten Moves Ahead

Bergan is not the most accomplished chess player of Vayne's cortege -- Vayne is only this winter man enough to no longer wear tights and short pants, and can already sometimes defeat him, though he is twelve years Vayne's senior -- but there is something instructive about the very shortcomings of his game. He plays so aggressively it seems exuberant, the bold sallies of his rooks, the slashing advances of his queen. He sacrifices his pawns easily, and neglects the oblique possibilities of his knights. If Vayne can play subtly enough to evade the full force of his onslaught, the victory can be wrested from him.

It's comforting, Vayne thinks, hesitating over the pieces. Archades, and doubly so House Solidor, seethes with plots and counter-plots, driven by men -- like his brothers -- who think ten moves ahead. They are none of them trustworthy. But Bergan is not of that mold, for all that the Akademy must have tried to make him so. He is fierce and direct, a sword, a _mace_ to be wielded by the man who can win his loyalty.

"It is not like you, to brood so long over your move," Bergan says.

Vayne smiles. "My apologies, he says. "I fear my mind is not wholly on the game." He slides a pawn forward, a temptation: Bergan will likely take it, though he risks losing a bishop in return.

"Your tutors would scold you," Bergan says. He reaches for his bishop, as Vayne expected. "You should think always of the battle before you." He moves, captures Vayne's pawn, plucks it from the board. His hands are broad, raw-boned, his knuckles scarred from bare-handed brawling. Zecht says he was the terror of their class.

"I grow too old for my tutors," Vayne says. That makes Bergan smile, but it also makes something less genteel flare in his eyes before he can hide it again. That quickly, the next ten moves unfold in Vayne's mind with perfect clarity: trust and ferocity, loyalty and pleasure. "The lessons I would most value now would not come from withered old men with their heads buried in dusty tomes." He takes Bergan's bishop with his knight, the pieces clicking lightly together.

Bergan reaches for a rook, but he is watching Vayne's face. "And what lessons are those?"

"You know them, do you not?" Vayne asks. He reaches out, brushes his fingertips over the back of Bergan's hand. "The men say, when they think me out of earshot, that the Akademy makes one a man in several ways."

"And you would learn of that from me?" Bergan asks. He conceals his hunger poorly.

Vayne watches him steadily, tracing meaningless patterns across the back of his hand, following the large veins there. "I would ask this only of a man I can trust," he says. "You have shown yourself to be that."

A more canny man would still hesitate, would still have questions. Would put him off. Would not, most likely, accept the advances of the emperor's youngest son at all.

Bergan turns his hand, catches Vayne by the wrist. His skin is warm, dry, rough with calluses. Something near alarm -- and yet markedly _not_ alarm -- jolts down Vayne's spine, and Bergan pulls, sharply enough that Vayne starts out of his chair, catching his weight on his free hand and knocking pieces from the board. "You will find," Bergan purrs, "that this has little in common with tupping the scullery maids."

Vayne can hear the challenge in it. "I am not afraid," he says -- and Bergan leans forward to take his mouth.

If what he shared with his dancing-partner at the winter ball was a kiss, then this is something else; if this is a kiss, then he has never been kissed before. Bergan's mouth is hard, unyielding; stubble prickles against Vayne's lips and his mouth is filled with the lewd press of Bergan's tongue. He was right to ask this of Bergan, and he thinks that Bergan was right but also _wrong_ about how this compares: lifting the skirts of the serving girls the way his brothers do is an exercise of power, and this -- when Bergan still holds his wrist, and plunders his mouth, how could this be anything else?

"The flush looks fetching on your cheeks," Bergan says. "You should spend more time in the training salles." His thumb brushes Vayne's lip. "Exerting yourself." He lets go Vayne's wrist, and Vayne moves to rise, but Bergan stays him. "Don't move," he says. "I would have you there."

Vayne's cheeks flush hotter, but he does not rise. The remains of their game still litter the table, tiny carven soldiers with their positions all askew, the orderly pattern of their war disrupted. A pawn rolls away as Bergan rises from the table; Vayne hears it clatter to the floor and clutches at a rook that threatens to follow suit.

Bergan's hands are confident on the fastenings of Vayne's clothes -- his over-robe parted to spill over his sides, his tunic rucked up in a crush of silk under his arms, his fine new trousers unlaced and pushed down past his knees. The air of the salon is cool against his skin, and Bergan's hands are hot, hot and rough. "Still not afraid?" Bergan says, and his sword-calluses catch and drag against the tender skin of Vayne's inner thighs.

"I am not," Vayne says, though his voice shakes, and he grips his rook tightly. "You will not be careless with me, if you value your position and your future."

Bergan laughs, and for just that one instant -- he does not play with an eye to the next ten movies, but only the immediate -- Vayne is afraid. "It's not my position I value so much as yours, at the moment," he says, his broad hands spreading Vayne wide. "But if you want to be coddled, I can give you that."

Vayne looks back, glaring, ready to protest the slight in those words -- but he meets Bergan's eyes then, as the man goes down on armored knee behind him, and the feral hunger in that expression kills the words in his throat. Not for anyone would Bergan concede even this much. It's an offer and a challenge and a promise, all at once if he can make it so, in hot breath on skin no man has touched before this.

There must be a name for what Bergan does then; it would be too grotesque to call this also a kiss, when Bergan's tongue enters him. Vayne closes his eyes, his breath hitching in silent gasps at the decadence of the caress. He's hardening for this, desire inflamed even as his curiosity is sated, and the gooseflesh that prickles over his skin has little to do with the winter air. He thinks of Bergan taking him, filling him more deeply than tongue alone can allow, and must bite his lip to stay silent: he will not moan for it before their tryst is even consummated. He will make Bergan do more for him than this.

It isn't easy to hold to his resolve, and less so when the rasp of metal behind him warns him that Bergan is unfastening his trousers. "You're ready to learn this lesson, are you, Lord Vayne?" Bergan asks, steadying himself against Vayne's hip as he rises. There's a growl in his voice that's almost aggression, save that Vayne knows better: he's a mastiff, Bergan, powerful and fierce, and devoted in no less measure.

Vayne looks back. "From you and no other," he says. He glances down, and feels himself both thrilled and taken aback by Bergan's sheer size -- but he should have expected that, when Bergan still towers over him in stature.

"Such a sweet tongue," Bergan says. "You'll be charming the Senate yourself soon, won't you?" He spits in his hand, the sound raw and brutal, and Vayne abruptly wants to see him without his armor, with all his raw spots and scars and torn edges bare. He will ask, next time, when he has satisfied Bergan once and is offering more --

And he takes a sharp breath when he feels Bergan press against him -- both of them slicked with spit now, and yes, he is a mace, a bludgeon, thick and hard and unyielding and -- Vayne cannot help the sound when he's taken thus, the faint lost cry of a prey animal. He is no such, will not be, but the sensation threatens to unmake him all the same: flesh drawn too taut, spread too far, filled with the conqueror's heat.

Bergan's arm encircles his waist, pulls him back to impale him deeper, until he knows not how he can bear so much. And yet -- "Would you stop me?" Bergan asks, as he reaches down to take Vayne in hand. "Is it yet too much for you after all?"

"I am no mere boy," Vayne retorts, and damn the tremor in his voice. "I will be satisfied, before we finish here."

"Of course, my lord," Bergan says, and Vayne can hear the laughter in his voice but not whether it is mocking or fond. "I would be failing in my duties were you not." He strokes Vayne confidently, his own thrusts for the moment subdued, and yet still this is nearly more than Vayne can stand.

The very coarseness of it, he thinks as Bergan's weight bears him down across the marble of the gaming table, is where the luxury lies: House Solidor will give him all the refinements he could desire, silk and fur and marble, but nothing so crude as this -- the raw scent on the air, the harsh rasp of Bergan's breath, even the discomfort itself seems an illicit indulgence. It will temper him, Vayne thinks, and impart some of a soldier's mettle in limbs he's nearly growing into.

Had he less pride he might be pleading, uncomfortable like this -- too full to concentrate on his own climax, too aroused to think of Bergan's, and when he considered this alone he doesn't think he ever expected it to be so _frustrating_ \-- and eventually, pride or no, he finds curses rising to his lips; his left hand is clenched so tight around the wayward rook that it aches, and now with his right he scrabbles for purchase against the edge of the table -- if he can get some leverage, can demand the tempo be _his_ \-- but Bergan is implacable, merciless, until Vayne thinks that his is after all the lesson: to seize the ragged threads of pleasure available to him here and wrest his satisfaction from them, to demand that as his right -- to draw taut in Bergan's grip like a winched crossbow and release, wracked with the savage thrill of triumph.

Bergan swears by gods Vayne does not know, grasps his hips and takes him without reserve. The violence of it makes his prior restraint clear, and Vayne feels sounds of protest torn from him now, by the barbarity of the act -- and yet he cannot bring himself to protest. There is power even in this, in the focus Bergan turns on him now, the need --

"Finish," Vayne demands, looking back to meet the bestial hunger in Bergan's eyes. "I would have you give me that."

"You'd have me come in this tight little arse, my lord?" Bergan says, and there's no respect at all in the address but -- but that's because he's traded it for camaraderie, Vayne thinks, the weight of House Solidor something they can both slip free of when they've turned its decorum on end like this.

"I would," Vayne says. He thinks he sounds as though he wants it. He tries to make that more plain in his tone. "I want you to."

Bergan laughs harshly, with what breath he has left, and shifts in a tight, steady rhythm that makes Vayne ache, too sensitive and too deeply filled -- but the sound, oh, the low snarl that Bergan makes when he shudders still -- it's a noise of surrender, of a dog mastered, and Vayne counts it instantly among the most dear things he has been given.

"Release me," he says, when he is sure Bergan is through. Despite the winter chill, his skin is damp beneath the ruin of his robes. He thinks, if he would allow himself to, he might be trembling now.

"You have need of a potion?" Bergan asks, his hand across the small of Vayne's back -- and Vayne would say no without a second thought, but then Bergan withdraws and the pain spikes sharp, and his breath stutters.

But no -- he will not admit such weakness. "For all your reputation," Vayne says, "you are not so savage as that." The pain is nothing he cannot bear.

It is the right answer; Bergan hums with pleasure, hands still stroking Vayne's bared skin. "And you are less delicate than a boy prince is expected to be. It'll serve you well."

Vayne draws himself upright, unfolds his hand from around the chess piece, and winces at the indentation it's left in his skin. He sets it down in the center of the board; it is the only piece standing. "As will all of Archadia, one day," he says.

Bergan laughs. "I've no doubt of it," he says. He doesn't seem to want to let go.

Let him not, then. "I need to bathe," Vayne says. He smiles; the way Bergan watches him is more than worth the discomfort. "You may attend me, if you would like."

A more canny man might hesitate, might think on the complications this could cause. Bergan will not -- and he will be Vayne's entirely, before long.


End file.
